Long Before Microsoft's Internet War: A Peaceful Ethernet

By JOHN MARKOFF

Published: May 18, 1998

SAN FRANCISCO, May 17—
Robert Metcalfe looks at the Microsoft civil war and other open hostilities in the software industry and remembers when the computer business was a kinder, gentler place to work.

But that was long before Microsoft's current battle with Federal and state governments and before the various other intramural industry fights in which one company or coalition strives to use control of a key technology as a means of gaining market dominance.

This week brings the 25th anniversary of Ethernet, a computing technology that Mr. Metcalfe helped invent and that in many ways was and still is as central and widely used in modern business computing as Microsoft's vaunted Windows operating system software.

But compared with Windows, which Microsoft holds in a vise-like grip, Ethernet is technology that followed a different, communal path. And it is a course that some experts say may still be worth emulating -- if the industry is going to be driven by innovation rather than by the sort of in-fighting that now finds Microsoft under threat of antitrust suits over its use of its Windows operating system standard as a proprietary tool both to control markets and to leverage its way into new ones. And beyond that, Sun Microsystems is battling Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard over control of Sun's Java programming language.

Ethernet, a combination of hardware and software for linking desktop computers or work stations into office networks, has an estimated 100 million users, supported by Cisco Systems, 3Com and about other 100 makers of Ethernet software and hardware, with combined annual sales of $15.5 billion.

But unlike Windows (or Java, or you name the software standard and somebody is probably jealously squabbling over it), Ethernet was developed by a company that quickly ceded it to the larger computing industry. And in contrast to a proprietary industry standard like Windows, which Microsoft controls, Ethernet has always been what software engineers call an open system -- one with a common technical core around which any company could create its own complementary products.

''Bill Gates, et al, have usurped the term 'open,' '' Mr. Metcalfe said. ''But Ethernet has remained pure; it is a true open standard.''

Mr. Metcalfe, who made his millions from an Ethernet company he founded, the 3Com Corporation, and now functions primarily as an industry ambassador without portfolio, will preside over a computer and communications conference this week in Laguna Niguel, Calif. There, on Thursday, he and other key members of the research team that created the technology will attend an anniversary party for Ethernet.

The story of how Ethernet became the de facto office networking standard is an important counterpoint to the bitter fighting that now characterizes most computer industry technologies, according to Mr. Metcalfe.

Ethernet grew out of the same confluence of research efforts a generation ago that led to the development of the TCP/IP communications software standard on which today's Internet is based.

Mr. Metcalfe had written his doctoral dissertation on packet data communications at Harvard, and when he arrived at Xerox's legendary Palo Alto Research Center in the early 1970's, he turned his attention to developing an office network that would for the first time permit workers to each have a desktop computer while sharing use of common equipment like printers and central storage computers called file servers.

In 1973, he and a fellow researcher at Xerox invented a network system capable of transmitting and receiving data at three million bits a second -- considered blazing speed in those days.

''The idea was that you could simply plug into the 'ether' wherever your computer was located,'' said Yogan Dalal, who joined the team several years later and served as Ethernet project manager at Xerox's Palo Alto center. He is now a partner at the Mayfield Fund, a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, Calif., that financed Mr. Metcalfe in 1979 when he founded 3Com as the first maker of Ethernet network circuitry cards. (Mayfield is sponsoring this week's anniversary party.)

Xerox, recognizing that it did not need to be in the office cabling business but that it did want to encourage wide use of its copiers, printers and computers, decided to all but give away the Ethernet technology.

To be sure, Ethernet did not immediately become the dominant industry standard. In the 1980's I.B.M. -- as dominant in the computer industry as Microsoft is considered today -- aggressively promoted a separate networking standard called token ring. And various small Silicon Valley companies were pursuing their own local-area-network approaches.

Eventually, however, Ethernet became the dominant approach as companies and their customers gravitated toward the open standard. Whatever wrinkles their own software or hardware might take, they knew that as long as it was based on the Ethernet core, any product would work with all other Ethernet products. Today, network routers, file servers and shared printers are among the common network resources that can be traced to the open Ethernet standard.

And this tradition allowed the industry to reach agreement on new generations of the technology, like Ethernet formats capable of transmitting as much as one billion bits of information each second.